Schrödinger Brand Guidelines: The New York Physics-Software Company Behind Glide & PyMOL

A Columbia chemist, a Caltech chemist and a famous surname.

Schrödinger began in 1990. The company’s own timeline names its co-founders as Richard Friesner and Bill Goddard, and English Wikipedia gives the same pair, listing the second as William A. Goddard III. Both were academic chemists. English Wikipedia describes Friesner as a theoretical chemist and professor of chemistry at Columbia University, elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2016, and Goddard as a professor of chemistry and applied physics at the California Institute of Technology, where he directs the Materials and Process Simulation Center.

The name is the surname of Erwin Schrödinger, the Austrian physicist of quantum mechanics, and the company keeps the ö in its own spelling, although web addresses and ticker listings drop it. Its subject is the behaviour of molecules: English Wikipedia describes Schrödinger, Inc. as a scientific software and biotechnology company whose tools simulate and model molecules at the atomic level, with molecular dynamics, free-energy calculations, quantum mechanics and virtual screening among them. The company calls its approach a physics-based computational platform, and says it has invested continuously in research and development for more than thirty years.

According to the company timeline, the first software sale, in 1992, went to Brookhaven National Laboratory, a United States national laboratory. The products that followed built the name in pharmaceutical research: Glide, released in 2001 and described by the company as a tool for high-throughput virtual screening of millions of compounds; Prime, a protein structure prediction program, in 2003; and WaterMap, for computing where water molecules sit around a protein, in 2009.

From docking to free energy, and a famous viewer.

The 2010s widened the portfolio. On 8 January 2010, English Wikipedia says, Schrödinger reached an agreement to acquire PyMOL, the molecular visualisation program created by Warren DeLano and first sold by DeLano Scientific. The company took over development, support and sales, and, Wikipedia notes, rebuilt its interface on Qt with version 2.0 in 2017.

The timeline marks a materials science business in 2012, and two releases in 2014: FEP+, a free-energy method for predicting differences in binding between related molecules, and LiveDesign, an enterprise informatics platform that English Wikipedia says is meant to help research teams from different disciplines work together. Materials work also produced one of the company’s most widely reported moments. In November 2013, CNET reported that a University of Southern California chemist had used Schrödinger’s materials science software to test some 205,000 organic compounds as candidates for photovoltaic cells, running for 18 hours on more than 156,000 processor cores rented from Amazon Web Services through Cycle Computing. CNET quoted Cycle Computing’s estimate that the same job would have taken 264 years on a conventional computer. English Wikipedia records an earlier collaboration in 2012, when Cycle Computing assembled a cloud cluster of some 50,000 cores using Schrödinger’s software to analyse 2.1 million compounds.

Schrödinger also took part in drug discovery directly. The company says it co-founded Nimbus Therapeutics with Atlas Venture in 2009, and English Wikipedia names Bayer and Takeda among its pharmaceutical partners and Boeing among its industrial ones. English Wikipedia adds that in 2016 Nimbus sold an enzyme-inhibitor programme designed with Schrödinger’s platform to Gilead Sciences. The company’s timeline also lists a 2010 collaboration with Agios, which it says led to two cancer medicines approved by the FDA, and a 2018 initiative to work with research centres using cryo-electron microscopy. In 2022, the company says, it began its first clinical trial for a programme it wholly owns.

How life-sciences software presents itself.

Life-sciences software is sold to scientists, clinicians, regulators and procurement teams at once, and the way these companies present themselves reflects that mixed audience. Their websites and brochures tend to show clean dashboards on laptops and tablets, molecule renderings and data charts, and people in lab coats or at clinic desks looking at screens. The product, in other words, is usually shown as an interface rather than an object.

The colour schemes follow the same logic. Many of these brands set one or two bright product colours against a lot of white space, so that charts, buttons and status labels stand out, and they use plain sans-serif type that stays legible in dense tables. Product families are often split into named “clouds,” “suites” or “platforms,” each with its own sub-brand, so a single company can carry dozens of product names under one mark.

Much of the selling happens in person. The sector gathers at trade conferences such as the DIA Global Annual Meeting, which brings together people working on drug development and regulation; Bio-IT World, which focuses on data and computing in life-sciences research; and SLAS, the laboratory-automation and screening society’s conference. Larger vendors also run their own customer summits, with keynote stages, product launches and user sessions; Medidata, for example, says its NEXT conference grew out of a user group for its Rave software.

Ownership matters too: several of the companies in this round have changed hands, and some have been bought by larger groups while keeping their own names. The guides in this round set out who founded each company, who owns it now and what it makes, and they mark clearly which statements rest only on the company’s own word.

A listed company with a dozen offices.

Schrödinger became a public company in 2020, its timeline records, and English Wikipedia lists the shares on Nasdaq under the ticker SDGR. The same year the company announced a multi-target drug discovery collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb. Wikipedia names Ramy Farid as president and chief executive and gives the headquarters as New York; the company’s locations page lists further American offices in Cambridge and Framingham, Massachusetts, Portland, Oregon, and San Diego, alongside Mannheim and Munich in Germany, Reading in England, Hyderabad and Bangalore in India, Tokyo, Seoul and Shanghai.

The software is sold to drug makers, biotech companies, chemical and energy firms and academic groups; English Wikipedia says licences are available to universities for teaching and not-for-profit research. The company describes the platform as combining the physics of molecular interactions with machine learning, and says its own therapeutics and materials teams use the same tools as its customers.

The umlaut is the most distinctive element of the name, and the company keeps it in running text even when its web address, ticker and many news headlines spell the name as Schrodinger.

For a design guide, Schrödinger shows how a company built on equations and code can carry a physicist’s surname as a brand and keep its accent intact. Compare Dassault Systèmes, the French engineering-software group, and Simulations Plus, another company that models how drugs behave. For this guide we use a wave indigo, an orbital violet and a solvent teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Schrödinger’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.